Mayhem and Murder in L.A.

The hotels bear names out of the vanished past of a Raymond Chandler
novel: the Palms-Wilshire, the Californian, the Barbizon. But in the
once tony Wilshire-Alvarado district of Los Angeles, a swath of wide
streets and pink stucco apartment buildings five minutes from downtown,
the elegance is gone. There, amid broken glass, dank, urine-stained
hallways, and discount shops, live more than 1,000 Marielitos, many
sporting the telltale tattoos that mark them as former prisoners in
Cuban jails. Squalid $8 rooms serve as base camps for drug dealers,
prostitutes and holdup gangs. Nearby...